Northampton' s railway station is 162 years old TODAY!
The first London & North Western Railway train chuffed out of what was then called Castle station on February 16 in 1859. There is no information on whether it was on time!
The original station — described as "unassuming" at the time — was rebuilt in 1880 once traffic picked up and again in 1965 when it was renamed Northampton. And again in 2015 when the new super-modern structure opened its ticket barriers to more than three million passengers a year.
The line between London and Birmingham originally swerved Northampton when it was built by engineer Robert Stephenson nearly 30 years earlier. So the current station was beaten by one in Bridge Street for the honour of being the town's first railway station.
Castle station was built by Richard Dunkley, from Blisworth, at a cost £612 as the southern end of an 18-mile line linking Northampton and Market Harborough but grew in importance once the 'loop' from Rugby in the late 1800s.
Bridge Street, on the Northampton and Peterborough Railway line, closed in the 1960s and British Rail chose to mark the occasion by renaming Castle station Northampton and replacing the Victorian structure with a 1960s version, designed by architect Ray Moorcroft, as part of the electrification of the West Coast Main Line between Euston and Liverpool.
The new version was described by one critic as "three cowsheds bolted together."
Those "cowsheds" remained until 2015 by when the station struggled to cope with the growth of Northampton's population and increasing demand for train travel, resulting in the £20million glass-fronted building opening on January 12, 2015.
4.
Parents and relatives of evacuees jam the platform waiting for a train to go see their loved ones in 1939. Photo: Getty Images